Falls flat
“A Change of Seasons” is another one of those Hollywood comedies after “The Last Married Couple in America”, “Serial”, and “Loving Couples” from 1980 that treats marriage as a long dead art form. Sex with one person was becoming passe and the open marriage was on the horizon, but Hollywood was still too chicken to really do anything with that but turn it into a silly, predictable sitcom and that is the key problem with this Anthony Hopkins-Shirley MacLaine romantic comedy.
They play Adam and Karen; he is a professor who has started an affair with one of his students (Bo Derek), and she is the wife who learns of the affair and begins a sexual tryst of her own with a handyman (Michael Brandon) seemingly to get back at him. Eventually all four wind up on a ski weekend together where Adam and Karen both try and pretend they like a more open arrangement while also trading barbs toward each other and toward their younger dates.
About the only good thing one could say for such a sitcom premise like this is that it has good actors who at least try to come off like two measured, intelligent people. Hopkins is at his reserved best; even with a funny line, he doesn’t try to overplay it and he has a kinda funny way of making bullshit, like explaining how male emotions are so different from women, sound like scholarly observation. MacLaine matches him step for step- she has a way of being both sunny and lacerating, even when the dialogue isn’t really that good. And Brandon has a scene later which is somewhat poignant- switching our point of view of him possibly stringing her along to the other way around. As for Derek, the film begins with a three minute slo-motion, naked hot tub scene that has nothing to do with anything and is never done again, and the fact marketing decided to use that for the film’s poster is all we really need to know about how the filmmakers viewed Derek in this film.
There is a good movie buried somewhere in here- one about a husband and wife who have grown to feel inhibited by each other- but instead the film falls back on aimless farce where jealousy is hidden behind walls and walls of sarcasm and where we don’t even believe the relationships at play because neither of these two couples have anything in common, or anything deeper than a fling, with their younger counterparts. The filmmakers seemed to have stopped at the unconventionality of the situation and figured the audience would look on, much like Adam and Karen’s daughter (Mary Beth Hurt) or Derek’s father (Edward Winter) does here, as if this is all wacky hijinks. It’s not very funny and the film begins to feel flatter and flatter the more these characters try for laughs rather than reveal themselves. In the end it’s a film that tries too hard, and yet not nearly enough.